My first ThinkPad ever, a X220, just arrived. I was quite disappointed when I unboxed the PC, because I realised there's no Windows license sticker, unlike all my past laptops. This means I'm stuck with the recovery partition, which I've always removed from all other laptops in the past. I've always done a complete clean installation of the OS when the system is new, which was my intention now too. Of course that requires downloading all the drivers online, but I don't mind doing so. Also I've bought a normal OEM version of the Win OS for my new laptops, so I've never used the vendor branded ones.

Now that there's of course no installation media included and there's even no license sticker, I seriously need some advice for what to do. Would it be my best choice to simply buy a new OEM license of Win 7 Pro 64-bit or is there any chance recovering the current Lenovo OEM serial key? Besides that I of course need to fetch a installation media to create a setup USB stick. But that too would require buying a new OEM version of Win 7. One a bit questionable option would of course be to fetch a pirated copy and use the Lenovo OEM serial key hidden somewhere inside the recovery partition, but I don't fancy the idea. So that's a no, no.

Or would you rather recommend me to stick with the way Lenovo has thought it should work and be used, i.e. don't wipe the recovery partition and stick with the Lenovo OEM version of Win 7, not even performing an initial clean slate setup?

On a sidenote, I was a bit disappointed to find out there's also no real manuals or something else noteworthy included with a new ThinkPad these days. Even my previous Samsung laptop had a sleeve case and actual manuals included.

Hardly any vendor gives you "media" nowadays (or indeed for most of the last decade or so)!

With a ThinkPad (and with most other brands of laptop) the device comes with software that allows you to can create your own factory install image "media" set, in case you ever want to do fresh install on a new SDD/HDD or whatever.

Once you have created your own "media", you can blow away the service partitions if that's what you want to do. Instructions are on the Lenovo support site.

I did however go with the default setup and just removed all the more useless software by Lenovo. VIP Access from Verisign looked suspicious to me, eventhough I did have a look at their website about what it's used for. Overall the default setup seems to quite fine in terms of performance.